"Commentary from P.M. Carpenter"

October 31, 2016

Most of you won't be interested in this, but others — those of you who have followed my daughter's life journeys, occasionally chronicled here on PMC's Commentary — will be. Said daughter, Ellie, just sent this film (titled "7 days, 4 people, 1 dog, 1 camping car") she took of her recent travels in France — from the southeast portion to westernmost tip. She doesn't appear in the film (3 1/2 minutes), since she was directing. The wonderful French folks you do see are her host family, whom I've never met but dearly love. (The starring, black-and-white dog is Mila, who, by the way, sleeps with Ellie every night.) Enjoy.

The evidence suggests that FBI Director James B. Comey is a decent man. The evidence also suggests that he has been intimidated by pressure from Republicans in Congress whose interest is not in justice but in destroying Hillary Clinton.

On Friday, a whipsawed Comey gave in. Breaking with FBI precedent and Justice Department practice, he weighed in on one side of a presidential campaign.

I don’t believe this was his intention. But his vaguely worded letter to Congress announcing that the FBI was examining emails on a computer used by Clinton aide Huma Abedin accomplished the central goals of the right-wing critics Comey has been trying to get off his back.

Especially disturbing is that some of those critics are inside the FBI. As The Post’s Sari Horwitz reported on Saturday, "a largely conservative investigative corps" in the bureau was "complaining privately that Comey should have tried harder to make a case" against Clinton.

For a major law-enforcement institution to be so politicized and biased against one party would be a genuine scandal. If Comey acted in part out of fear that his agents would leak against him, it would reflect profound dysfunction within the FBI.

It seemed obvious from the start that Mrs. Clinton’s decision to follow Colin Powell’s advice and bypass State Department email was a mistake, but nothing remotely approaching a crime. But Mr. Comey was subjected to a constant barrage of demands that he prosecute her for … something. He should simply have said no. Instead, even while announcing back in July that no charges would be filed, he editorialized about her conduct — a wholly inappropriate thing to do, but probably an attempt to appease the right.

It didn’t work, of course. They just demanded more. And it looks as if he tried to buy them off by throwing them a bone just a few days before the election. Whether it will matter politically remains to be seen …

… just as the larger Republican Project remains a subject of morbid fascination: that of destroying or throwing into chaos every last American institution — except Republicanism.

Which part of the Project fascinates me the most? Republicans' endlessly expressed love of their country, and all its traditions.

For several days now I have watched one wretched Republican pol after another appear on cable news, genuflecting at the virtuous splendor of James Comey's equally wretched, vastly ill-advised interference in the presidential race — with respect, of course, to Hillary Clinton's emails.

And for several days now I have tried to imagine what their reaction would be to Director Comey announcing, just days before the election, that his FBI is actively investigating Donald Trump's "charitable" irregularities, as wells as his campaign's traitorous cahoots with 400-pound Russian hackers and a tinpot quasi-Soviet dictator, whose little bitch and useful idiot goes by the name of Trump.

My guess is these Republican pols just might be a trifle perturbed, a bit displeased and, quite possibly, even somewhat vocal about it.

You think? I so hate going out on limbs.

Indeed, their displeasure might even surpass the trifling. In fact, they'd probably burn down the J. Edgar Hoover Building and send Mr. Comey fleeing into the witness protection program.

That's a fascinating quote, since it comes 12 paragraphs after the Post's lede: "FBI agents investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state knew early this month that messages recovered in a separate probe might be germane to their case, but they waited weeks before briefing the FBI director."

Six paragraphs after that? "Officials said the agents probing Clinton’s private email server didn’t tell the director immediately because they were trying to better assess what they had." Fair enough. Yet two paragraphs later: "Investigators will now look at whether the newly uncovered emails contain classified information or other evidence that could help advance the Clinton email probe."

So the crack law enforcement agency that doesn't sit on its hands sat on its chain-of-command hands for weeks as it first labored throughout those weeks to "better assess" recovered evidence which it "will now" assess — meaning weeks of assessment were essentially void of assessment.

In brief, the FBI hasn't a clue. Literally. It's quite possible, even probable, that the "pertinent" emails discovered are but duplicates "of others already recovered elsewhere" or simply "a collection of benign, personal notes." But we should dismiss speculation about probable innocence. For the fact of the matter is that what the FBI possessed weeks ago is, by its own and still-unaltered admission, a wholesale lack of any wrongdoing evidence.

That, however, ultimately failed to deter FBI Director James Comey from throwing an eleventh-hour grenade into the presidential race, which of course violated Justice Department protocol and infuriated veteran prosecutors. The Justice department will no doubt wish to tighten its guidelines before another reckless FBI director plays with things that go boom. Pragmatically speaking, though, what's done is done, and the "pertinent" question now is how Comey's recklessness is influencing the race. Concludes the afore-cited story:

A Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll found that more than 6 in 10 likely voters said the FBI’s announcement would make no difference in their vote. A little more than 3 in 10 said the news made them less likely to support Clinton, though about two-thirds of those were Republicans or Republican-leaning independents.

The way I read that "3 in 10" statistic is that, discounting the Republican or Republican-leaning 2 in 10, the news left 1 in 10 less likely to support Clinton; in other words, 10 percent of the likely-voting electorate. And in swing states in which presidential contests are often decided by 1, 2 or 3 percent margins, a negatively influenced 10 percent is immense.

The polling could be in error, of course. Or the Comey Effect may possess a lifespan of only 48 hours or so. What's more, even now-less-supportive Clinton voters may still comprehend that voting for the ignorant, racist, misogynistic, vastly unfit neofascist alternative is no rational alternative at all.

All of that notwithstanding, the evidence at hand — something the FBI no longer obsesses over — suggests that the Comey Effect is both real and damaging to Hillary Clinton. This further suggests that Donald Trump's nonetheless inevitable loss will look more like John McCain's than Barry Goldwater's; unless, that is, Director Comey soon does, by any reasonable standard of fairness, what he should do: Confess publicly that the FBI doesn't have squat — never did.

October 30, 2016

Perhaps you recall the Sidney Lumet-directed, Cold War film Fail Safe (1964), whose ultimately dreadful yet vastly pragmatic premise is that two wrongs can indeed make a right. Its larger plot, briefly stated, is that computer errors and technical complications cause the U.S. Strategic Air Command to, ahem, accidently annihilate Moscow. President Henry Fonda thereupon concludes that to avert full-scale, Soviet nuclear retaliation and global destruction, he, in turn and without domestic warning, must annihilate New York City and all its inhabitants as a demonstration of sorry-about-that good faith.

Fail Safe is a helluva gut-wrenching film; if you haven't seen it, you should. Other than its underlying morality tale — that of unspeakably catastrophic technology outpacing humanity's ability to control it — the movie upends your mother and kindergarten teacher's well-meaning admonition that two wrongs can never make a right. Sometimes, tit-for-tit dreadfulness is the only way to balance the scales of justice. Accordingly, President Fonda could teach FBI Director James Comey a thing or two. The NY Times:

The [director's letter to Congress] rankled Mrs. Clinton’s supporters in part because Mr. Comey has been circumspect in his remarks about another federal investigation, this one involving allegations of Russian meddling in the election. American officials believe that Russian intelligence agents are behind the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails, which have embarrassed the Clinton campaign.

Senior Democrats have called on the F.B.I. to investigate whether any of Donald J. Trump’s aides are colluding with Russia. Some of his aides have ties to Russian interests, but they have denied any wrongdoing.

While Mr. Comey told Congress last month that he would not confirm the existence of any investigation into people associated with Mr. Trump, he said he felt compelled to discuss details of the Clinton investigation because it involved "exceptional circumstances where the public needed information."

A swelling contingent of former Justice Department officials (see, for example, this and this) has denounced Comey's brandished investigation into Clinton's emails as a stupefying and unprecedented wrong. Coming, as it did, within two weeks of the presidential election, the director's horrendous judgment has disoriented Clinton's campaign and energized Trump's supporters. With no much-needed time in which to defend herself, the Democratic nominee is rendered a flailing victim of official malfeasance. What's done is done.

There is, however, a way for Director Comey to at least somewhat right his unprecedented wrong. He can annihilate New York City. Which is to say (though bloody obvious the metaphor is) he can similarly announce that the FBI indeed has an active investigation into the Trump campaign's collusion with Russian hackers — and "Premier" Valdimir Putin himself. If the presence of Clinton emails on a former congressman's laptop poses an exceptional circumstance about which the public needed to know — and right or wrong, that's a done deal — then the widely rumored circumstance of Trumpian miscreants colluding with a hostile foreign power to influence an American presidential election qualifies as equally exceptional — in fact, far more so.

As dreadfully wrong as it might be in the annals of legal ethics, Director Comey should rightly fire off a letter to Republican committee chairmen and thus the American electorate, informing both that Trumpian treason is under active investigation. This, Comey should "confirm." He can always add that nothing of any significance may be found, and, well, damn, he can't really say any more. But fair is fair. New York for Moscow.

October 29, 2016

American politics has morphed with frightening endurance into a low-budget Kafka play, directed by Ed Wood. And we, the spectators, are all helpless bugs on a wall. There is no escape from this theatrical farce of a nightmare; it'll all be over in 10 days, we're told in stage asides, but of course it won't be over, come that predestined night of November 8. Nor will it be over in three months, as President Clinton settles in to four years of mindless Supreme Court battles, critical policy rejections, frivolous investigations and classic Republican bugabooing.

Let us review the tragicomedy's latest: Scene I, Act CCCLXXVIII. A disgraced and altogether forgettable former congressman had "sexted" some really bored women on a laptop, which may contain emails "pertinent" to an equally forgettable investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails — although the former secretary of state had absolutely nothing to to do with the little weenie's "pertinent" emails being on his laptop. This masturbatory crime of the century — oh my, worse than last century's Watergate! — compelled the FBI to reopen its unclosed investigation into SecState's electronic correspondence, recently and exhaustively revealed to be as yawm-worthy as the former congressman's underemployed testosterone.

This, the FBI was compelled to do (which itself is a rather long, risible subplot) a mere 11 days from the presidential election, in which an experienced, conventional Democratic pol is pitted against an ignorant fascist who rightly horrifies the lingeringly sane among his own, erstwhile party. The latter's inevitable nomination sprang from Scene I, Act I, which debuted an agonizing 16 months ago. It was then that Kafka commenced scribbling, and we became helpless bugs on his wall.

Shifting rapidly to Scene II of the latest theatrical acts of madness, the FBI director was also compelled to email his junior g-men (by the way, in the interest of "transparency," shouldn't we be allowed to see all of Director Comey's emails?) and explain why the once-distinguished law enforcement agency now resembles a Republican puppet. "We [meaning I] don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails," he wrote. Nonetheless, compelled he was to openly investigate their almost certain insignificance. For at the root of his compulsion was that most primal motivator of all Beltway behavior: the need to cover one's ass.

All this comedy "left Mrs. Clinton’s team furious and scrambling for explanations" as to just what in the fuck it is that Jimmy & Co. is investigating. Did Anthony leave some spoo on his blue laptop while sucking down some of Huma's unclassified homework? Who the hell knows; what's more, who the hell cares? The empirical arts inform us that after months, years, of investigating the latest Clinton scandal, nothing of any significance will be revealed.

I can, however, answer the aforementioned question. Enter the ignorant fascist, stage right, and his Goebbelsesque gang of cutthroats — all of whom know what this is all about, and care very much. Brayed his Orange Ignorance to New Hampshire cheers of "lock her up": "Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office."

The Republican national committee chairman whooped that the "F.B.I.'s decision to reopen their criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s secret email server" proved that "the Democratic nominee should be disqualified from seeking the presidency," and a ghastly fascist should be installed, forthwith. The Republican speaker of the House hysterically declared that the de facto president-elect "should no longer be allowed to receive classified briefings." And somewhere, the House Oversight Committee chairman, Jason Chaffetz — a man so virtuous as to effectively endorse said ghastly fascist for president — is gearing up for four years of utterly fruitless investigations, all of which will subtract in whole from actual governance.

As noted, the presidential election is already decided as a fundamental matter of anti-fascist sentiment, hence American democracy remains reasonably sane. But as for American politics? It's become blazingly saddled by a kind of evil Mel Brooks, rewriting Franz Kafka's draft. And this bug has just about had enough of the farce.

October 28, 2016

Trump's "in-the-tank-for-Hillary" media will now spend at least the next 72 hours reporting on FBI Director James Comey's "bombshell" announcement that his agency "is reviewing new evidence in its investigation into her use of a private email server as secretary of state."

Comey made the announcement in "a letter to several House committee chairmen" — meaning Republican politicians all. The FBI director conceded that his fresh, "bombshell" investigation may be looking into absolutely nothing that is "significant."

"Clinton’s campaign," reports Politico, "appeared blindsided by the news." That was more than mere appearance.

Let us ponder Republican reaction at an FBI announcement, 11 days before the presidential election, that it was opening an investigation into the Trump Foundation's irregularities.

According to reports filed Thursday night with the Federal Election Commission, Trump donated just $31,000 to his campaign during the first three weeks of this month, bringing his self-funding total to $56.1 million for the campaign. Trump, who has often bragged about not being beholden to special interests, previously said he was ready to spend at least $100 million of his own money during the presidential race.

Said Trump's most proficient mouthpiece, Kellyanne Conway, on Fox News:

“He will continue to make investments into his campaign including in these last 11 days"…. When pressed on whether Trump would write a check on Friday, Conway responded, "He may. We’ll see what happens today."

Despite Trump’s claim that he doesn’t believe the polls, his San Antonio research team spends $100,000 a week on surveys … and has sophisticated models that run daily simulations of the election. The results mirror those of the more reliable public forecasters—in other words, Trump’s staff knows he’s losing. Badly.

And so, of course, does Trump. Bigly.

Compared to actual billionaires he may be a pisspoor businessman, but he is competent enough to know not to pour his perfectly good money into a rathole.

***

Well, he's dumber than I thought. "Donald Trump made a $10 million wire transfer to his campaign on Friday morning, according to the Wall Street Journal."

Writing from London, the Post's Michael Gerson sees essentially the same Republican future as I did earlier this morning:

In Britain, the center-right party has been sobered into self-reflection. In the United States, it is on the verge of being destroyed. Instead of doing something essential and difficult — finding creative ways to help the "just managing" working class without alienating rising minorities — Republicans are working out internal grudges and dealing with the demons of a narcissistic misogynist. And there is little hope that Election Day will end the bitterness. A recent poll found that Republicans, by a majority of 51 percent to 33 percent, believe Trump to be a better representative of GOP views than House Speaker Paul D. Ryan.

That is a party hopelessly hijacked by anti-intellectualism, for Ryan, though he's the party's smoother and more positive alternative, is as pseudo-cerebral as Trump. While the latter flails in scatterbrained demagoguery, Ryan marinates in ideology — which is also profoundly antithetical to conservatism's intellectual founding.

To anyone interested in the history — and future — of intellectual conservatism, this morning's David Brooks is a must-read. In looking backward, he mostly navigates the right themes, I think. In briefly looking forward, however, he shipwrecks on the shallow rocks of unfounded optimism. On this latter point, perhaps I'm wrong; perhaps Brooks sees a real, safe, nearby intellectual harbor that escapes my somewhat cynical view. More on that, momentarily.

As for contemporary conservatism already wrecked? Brooks surveys three causes. "First, talk radio, cable TV and the internet have turned conservative opinion into a mass-market enterprise…. It’s ironic that an intellectual tendency that champions free markets was ruined by the forces of commercialism, but that is the essential truth. Conservatism went down-market in search of revenue. It got swallowed by its own anti-intellectual media-politico complex — from Beck to Palin to Trump."

I would add, maybe unnecessarily, that conservatism also went down-market in search of votes. The New Right of the 1970s was old Godlwaterism and coming Reaganism married to Christian evangelicalism, which by nature and definition embraces the absolutism of no compromise, ever. Absent religion and politics, debate and argumentation are dull things. But religion in politics — that is, the politics of governing — is an anti-republican pathogen that eats at the core of American pluralism. This, the historically grounded founders knew, and so went out their way to build constitutional walls between them — to which the New Right promptly took a sledgehammer. And, as a major conservative constituency, it's still hammering.

"Second," writes Brooks, the "very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre-political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community. But recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party." What Brooks is getting at here is, of course, conservatism's past, almost metronomic rejection of Burkeanism: a fundamentally pragmatic faith in social institutions, tradition, and continuity. No longer is such faith "the very essence of conservatism"; it hasn't been since the rise of ideological libertarianism, which is the very essence of social atomism — and thus wholly incompatible with Burkeanism. As they were chasing votes for the self-serving sake of political power, conservative intellectuals silently watched the latter slip away as the third of Brooks' noted causations took hold. To wit …

"Blinkered by the Republican Party’s rigid anti-government rhetoric, conservatives were slow to acknowledge and even slower to address the central social problems of our time. For years, middle- and working-class Americans have been suffering from stagnant wages, meager opportunity, social isolation and household fragmentation. Shrouded in obsolete ideas from the Reagan years, conservatism had nothing to offer these people because it didn’t believe in using government as a tool for social good. Trump demagogy filled the void." It should be further and rather hastily noted that Trump's demagogy is scarcely an innovation in Republican politics, which, through degraded Christianity and what's-yours-is-yours-only ideology, has been populistically bamboozling middle- and working-class white Americans for decades.

So there you have it, a rather tidy survey of modern conservatism's inevitable wreckage. Its pile-up has been a long time coming, and though I criticize conservative intellectuals for their lack of rocks-ahoy! vigilance throughout, I'm not sure that such active vigilance would have averted much. Once conservative-"fusion" theorists of the 1950s and 1960s decided on the unstable, shotgun marriage of evangelicals and libertarians for the sake of an artificially expanded base and consequent political power, inexorable damage was done. Republican politicians swamped intellectual conservatism with their endless greed for more power, which, in time, became conservatism's only reason for being.

What is Brooks' "optimistic" answer to all this? "Most young conservatives are comfortable with ethnic diversity and are weary of the Fox News media-politico complex. Conservatism’s best ideas are coming from youngish reformicons who have crafted an ambitious governing agenda (completely ignored by Trump). A Trump defeat could cleanse a lot of bad structures and open ground for new growth." Brooks' answer, in short, is more intellectualism.

But with that there is a problem, and it is a big one. As observed (by me, if not by Brooks), Trump's demagogy is scarcely new; in fact, by now it defines Republicanism, whose hardcore rabble follows only the right's media-politico complex. In postwar conservatism's adriftness, Republican pols could take cues from conservative intellectuals, as the former sought means to the end of an expanded base. And now they're stuck with that base. The only means by which they can retain what power they have is by pandering to the demagogically inclined — which, of course, sidelines any thoughtful conservatism. Brooks' intellectualism is marooned on an isolated isle of navel-gazing. And I just can't see it floating its way, anytime soon, into modern Republicanism — which, desperately, is all about nothing but power.

"We have three major voter suppression operations under way," says a [Trump campaign] senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are "super predators" is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls.

All of which, according to an AP-GfK poll just released, has contributed to Clinton's significant leads over Trump in bipartisan support, "fueled by increased enthusiasm." Reports the Boston Herald: Hillary "has secured the support of 90 percent of likely Democratic voters, and also has the backing of 15 percent of more moderate Republicans. Just 79 percent of all Republicans surveyed say they are voting for their party's nominee."

When interviewing these Trump supporters, the NY Times' reporters were, I hope, armed with a fully charged cattle prod and freshly unsealed can of Bruce Wayne's anti-psychosis Bat spray:

* "People are going to march on the capitols. They’re going to do whatever needs to be done to get her out of office, because she does not belong there. If push comes to shove [and Clinton] has to go by any means necessary, it will be done."

* "It’s not what I’m going to do, but I’m scared that the country is going to go into a riot…. The country has never been so divided. I’m looking at revolution right now.”

* "You go through any neighborhood and see how many Trump signs there are and how many Hillary signs there are, and I guarantee you it’s not even going to be close. The only way they’ve done it is by rigging the election."

* "Unfortunately [my emphasis], I’m not a man of vigilante violence. I’m more of a peaceful person. But I do think there will be a large amount of people that are terribly upset and may take matters into their own hands."

* "If [Clinton] comes after the guns, it’s going to be a rough, bumpy road. I hope to God I never have to fire a round, but I won’t hesitate to. As a Christian, I want reformation. But sometimes reformation comes through bloodshed."

Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein has largely based her campaign on her uncompromising positions on the environment, opposition to big banks and Wall Street, defense contractors, and the pharmaceutical industry. But an analysis of her financial disclosures, which she was required to file as a presidential candidate, show she is heavily invested in the very industries that she maligns the most and as a result of her investments, she has built significant wealth.

According to the financial-disclosure form she filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics on March 30, 2016, Stein and her husband, Richard Rohrer, have investments (with the exception of real estate) valued at anywhere from $3,832,050 to $8,505,000….

While Stein claims that she had difficulty finding funds that aligned with her values, she didn’t explain why she chose to remain in funds that are completely disjointed from her values.

Daily we read of the GOP's imminent crackup, its looming civil war, its potential unraveling in factional bloodbaths. These downward metamorphoses are projected to reel off in the near post-election season, as President-elect Clinton assembles an administration confronting a solid congressional opposition defined only by fractures and incoherence. So say political projections, which can be dicey things. But not this one — for this one is in the rearview mirror.

As the Post's Greg Sargent notes in "The GOP civil war is coming," we already possess statistical evidence that "Republicanism" — once the ideology of middle-class cloth coats and store-minding prudence — is now the political equivalent of clinical, paranoid schizophrenia. The figures that Sargent cites would be breathtaking if Bedlam hadn't opened its doors for public inspection long ago. "A recent Bloomberg poll found that 51 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaners say Trump better represents their view of what the GOP should stand for" than does the Republican speaker of the House, the party's once and future "leader." To God, country, and mothers everywhere, this finding would be happy news if the GOP rank and file's preference weren't 51 times loopier than Ayn Rand.

"Meanwhile," continues Sargent, "another poll shows that two thirds of Republicans think voter fraud is a bigger problem than voter disenfranchisement is — meaning they’ll be open to Trump’s argument that the election was stolen from them." Two thirds, two thirds of Republicans either genuinely believe this unhinged slop or, worse, are so genuinely dishonorable as to fake it. On such dishonor is tomorrow's virtuous conservatism to be founded.

Over at Heritage Action, its chief executive, Michael Needham, tells the NY Times that "If the party doesn’t learn lessons and change based on what’s gone on for the last year and a half, I think it’s going to be just catastrophe." On its face, that's an eminently rational observation; the last year and a half of Trumpism has been a chronological roadmap to GOP catastrophe. That, however, is not what Needham meant. What he meant was that Trumpism — about to max out, electorally, in the high 30s — is the GOP's healthiest, most rational future.

Elsewhere, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Jason Chaffetz, is preparing for years of Clinton investigations. If, from the bully pulpit, the president plays her cards right, Chaffetz's Road Runner House could well be the greatest motivator for a historic Housecleaning in 2020, as well as Clinton's easy reelection. Endless email and Benghazilike investigations are not what an electorate anxious for "change" will have voted for. Assisting Chaffetz & Co. will be the Senate's Ted Cruz & Co.: "There is certainly long historical precedent for a Supreme Court with fewer justices." Any way one cuts it, as a national political strategy this is inarguably bonkers.

Finally (but not really), the GOP's Tea Partiers have achieved Full Walsh — that being the former United States Representative who declared on Twitter yesterday "that he will take up arms if Donald Trump is not elected to the presidency." One might be tempted to think that armed rebellion would be frowned on by the party of Lincoln — but these days, such is the last full measure of Republican devotion to madness.

Does any of this read as though the GOP's crackup is merely imminent, or that internal war looms, or that its factional unraveling is only one of potential? Even the Whigs weren't this obvious.

October 26, 2016

For Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the lesson of 2016 should not be that Trump voters are irredeemable. It should be that by paying more attention to the plight of blue-collar workers, and offering inclusive solutions to the great challenges roiling our country and the world, they have a real opportunity to expand the Obama coalition of minorities and young people who make up the Democratic base today.

Doing more to reverse the "plight of blue-collar workers" is of course a conscientious goal in itself, no matter the politics. But as a matter of politics? As Fareed Zakaria argues in a recent Foreign Affairs essay:

[T]he crucial difference between the left and the right today is cultural. Despite what one sometimes hears, most analyses of voters for Brexit, Trump, or populist candidates across Europe find that economic factors (such as rising inequality or the effects of trade) are not the most powerful drivers of their support. Cultural values are. The shift began … in the 1970s, when young people embraced a postmaterialist politics centered on self-expression and issues related to gender, race, and the environment. They challenged authority and established institutions and norms, and they were largely successful in introducing new ideas and recasting politics and society. But they also produced a counterreaction. The older generation, particularly men, was traumatized by what it saw as an assault on the civilization and values it cherished and had grown up with. These people began to vote for parties and candidates that they believed would, above all, hold at bay these forces of cultural and social change.

For the Democratic Party, "these people," politically, are gone. Again, that doesn't mean the economics of their plight are to be ignored; it's just that Democrats' favor won't be reciprocated at the voting booth. This is the key insight that Republican pols cynically perceived long ago, and powerfully exploited.

Academic research has picked up something that thousands of hours of campaign punditry has missed completely: Donald Trump talks like a woman….

His linguistic style is startlingly feminine, so much so that the chasm between Trump and the next most feminine speaker, Ben Carson, is about as great as the difference between Carson and the least feminine candidate, Jim Webb.

Postscript: I should note what I neglected to note in my original "Miss Donald Trump" post, which commenter JTL graciously did for me: "I don't think PM's point is to say 'Oooh, look, Donald Trump is limp wristed!' Nor is his point to say that making effeminate gestures is bad. The point is that it would be fun to see how the machismo of his campaign would deal with someone pointing that out."

Some conservatives told themselves that Fox and Drudge and Breitbart were just the evolving right-of-center alternative to the liberal mainstream media, when in reality they were more fact-averse and irresponsible. Others (myself included) told ourselves that this irresponsibility could be mitigated by effective statesmanship, when in reality political conservatism’s leaders — including high-minded figures like Paul Ryan — turned out to have no strategy save self-preservation.

"Myself included."

I hereby retract my criticism of Douthat for his persistence in evading at least some responsibility for the ungodly horrors that are movement conservatism, although his recently added touch was a nicely admirable one indeed: blame Clinton.

And so I applaud Mr. Douthat's introspection, which, unfortunately, he then clouded by referring (genuinely, I assume) to Paul Ryan as a "high-minded figure." If ever there was a fact-averse, irresponsible policymaker, that would be the magically asterisked Speaker of the House.

In the hours of biographical background tape released to the NY Times and now making the Internet rounds, Trump said he doesn't "have heroes." I tend to the same, since a lifetime of reading non-hagiographic biographies of "the greats" has tended to disabuse me of hero-worship (except for the gentleman at the right, and his current successor). But in reading the Times' tale of the Trump tapes, its subject becomes something of a hero to my sort — the neurotically aspiring. I thought I was at least in the semiprofessional league of clinical neuroses and character flaws — a fearful "reluctance to reflect" on the meaning of life; an acceptance of Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?"; the inherent headaches of "being married to me."

But this guy Trump? In the field of neurotics and personality disorders, he blows right by me.

He possesses, for instance, a "deep-seated fear of public embarrassment." For heaven's sake why? See: Peggy Lee's lyrics. He is "fixated on his own celebrity [and is] anxious about losing his status." I have neither celebrity nor status to lose; but if I did, I'd like to think that I'd also realize that fixations on, and anxieties about, them would only hasten their loss. Trump is "contemptuous of those who fall from grace." Are they not merely more human, worthy of empathy? He also experiences a "visceral pleasure … from fighting." I've come to detest conflict — unless I'm confronting an oxymoronic, Mediacom "customer service" rep.

Trump said as well that he "never had a failure." Now that's a sign of major-league neurosis. In seeing nothing but personal failures, I'm in the minors.

Thus far, we, Trump and I, are about on a par when it comes to unfitness for the White House. He excels at some neuroses, I at others, and neither are characteristics that one would wish in a president. There is one taped passage, however, in which Trump's presidential unfitness, as noted, blows past mine like a typhoon. "For the most part, you can’t respect people because most people aren’t worthy of respect," he said.

This, of course, we already knew about Trump. He treats his political followers with the same respect with which he has always treated his business partners: none. To Trump, everyone is a mark. His Trumpeteers are fools and he knows it. But their foolishness isn't worth enlightenment; it is, rather, just a failing to be exploited, much like the greed of his stiffed partners. To Trump, the highest virtue is that of flimflamming the lowest common denominators. To Trump, since all propositions are self-serving, disrespect for others and their interests comes naturally.

In a president, whose charge is the welfare of 319 million Americans, is a more egregious characteristic imaginable?

And here I thought I was crawling with neuroses, character flaws and presidential unfitness. You win, Donald. You're an absolute loser.